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Rolandsen, Øystein H. and Leonardi, Cherry (2014) 'Discourses of violence in the transition from colonialismto independence in southern Sudan, 1955�1960.', Journal of Eastern African studies., 8 (4). pp. 609-625.

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1

Discourses of violence in the transition from

colonialism to independence in southern Sudan,

1955-60

Øystein H. Rolandsen and Cherry Leonardi

(Peace Research Institute Oslo) (Durham University)

Abstract

The Torit Mutiny of August 1955 in southern Sudan did not trigger a civil war, but

state violence and disorder escalated over the following years. We explore how

the outlook and strategies of the government officials who inherited the state

apparatus of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium contributed to this development.

They perpetuated authoritarian and violent government practises based on a

legalistic distinction between citizen and outlaw, while justifying their actions as

part of a developmentalist and nationalistic discourse. The Mutiny created fear of

another outbreak of violence which prompted recourse to collective punishment,

an expanded intelligence network and bolstered the powers and mandate of the

chiefs. However, the authoritarian tendencies were paired with developmentalism

and the desire to educate and civilise the southerners. Through education and the

justice and penal system they were to be ‘made to learn’ how to become ‘modern’.

This combination of perpetuating colonial government practises and fervent

nationalism resonates with analyses of transitions to independence elsewhere in

Africa, from which the case of southern Sudan has been largely excluded up to

now.

Key words: Sudan, South Sudan, state violence, colonial inheritance, independence

In August 1955, less than six months before Sudan’s declaration of independence, the

newly ‘Sudanised’ administration faced a violent uprising in the southernmost province of

Equatoria. Over a two week period, 261 northern Sudanese men, women and children were

killed by southern soldiers, police and prison officers and others who joined in the violence

and looting. Many southerners fled the towns, including 55 who drowned trying to cross a

river near Torit. Northern troops arrived in force towards the end of August and arrested a

large share of the mutineers and many civilians; some fled to Uganda and Congo and only

some few mutineers stayed in ‘the bush’ in the eastern parts of Equatoria and the Sudan-

Uganda borderlands. The Khartoum government response was restrained, but not lenient:

perhaps as many as 1,000 were imprisoned and at least 121 death sentences were carried out.1

2

This violent episode – known at the time as the ‘Southern disturbances’, and more commonly

now as the ‘Torit Mutiny’ – has come to be regarded as a crucial moment in Sudan’s

transition to independence in 1956. It is commemorated by many South Sudanese as the

beginning of the ‘struggle’ against northern dominance. Scholars too have viewed the events

of 1955 in hindsight as ‘a fateful omen for the beginning of a half-century of bloody,

unrelenting civil war’.2 The Torit Mutiny is thus understood as a rupture, separating the

relative stability of the Pax Brittanica from an increasingly violent and repressive post-

colonial southern Sudan.

The Mutiny – as the perceived start of the civil war – has therefore been subsumed

into broader analyses of the causes of conflict. In a polarised national historiography,

northern Sudanese scholars attribute the first civil war to the harmful, divisive effects of the

British colonial ‘Southern Policy’, while southern scholarship has criticised colonial neglect

for leaving southerners vulnerable to the political and military domination of northerners.3

But recent research has demonstrated that only from 1963 can conflict between the

government and southern rebel forces be termed civil war, making not just the 1955 Mutiny

but the period after it crucial to understanding the causes of war.4 Historians have only

cursorily recounted the post-independent repression by the new Sudanese administrators in

the south, and attempts to impose national unity through campaigns of Arabicisation and

Islamicisation, including the eventual expulsion of Christian missionaries in 1964.5 But this

narrative of a sudden shift in policy and administrative practices both underestimates the

inherent violence of the colonial state, and wrongly assumes that its successors had altogether

different agendas. Instead of revolution, the nationalists only sought control over the existing

government institutions and instruments to rule the people of Sudan.6

This article thus argues for a much greater degree of continuity in the use of state

violence from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Newly available archival material from

the 1950s demonstrates considerable concern among these Sudanese administrators to justify

coercive methods and policies in ways that are strikingly similar to colonial discourse.7 This

is particularly evident in their emphasis on legalism and developmentalism – the two main

strands of government discourse to be explored here. The methods of administration followed

by the new Sudanese officials were similar to those of their predecessors, relying on chiefs at

the centre of colonial ‘Native Administration’ to be the agents of state development, justice

and security. The Mutiny undoubtedly provoked insecurity and paranoia among northern

3

Sudanese officials in the south, but the violence of August 1955 – and the threat of its

recurrence – also fed the elaborate discourse of legalism, state sovereignty and citizenship,

through which the duties of state and subjects were being defined in the late colonial and

early postcolonial period. We can therefore trace significant continuities in the government

administrators’ perception of South Sudan and its people, and in the methods and principles

by which they were to be ruled. In the Sudanese administrative language of law and order,

and public security, the southerners were to be ‘developed’, ‘modernised’ and ‘civilised’.

We will thus explore the continuities of governance in southern Sudan in the period

1954-60, to argue for its integration into the wider literature on the transition to

independence. First we examine the outlook of the new northern Sudanese administrators

immediately after they took up their posts in South Sudan in the period from mid-1954 to

early August 1955. This was a period marked by optimism on behalf of the state’s capacity to

positively transform societies in southern Sudan and to integrate the southerners into a larger

national endeavour of modernisation, which we locate in the broader literature on African

nationalist projects. Then we demonstrate how the violence of late August 1955 accentuated

the more authoritarian aspects of this agenda: the southern Sudanese needed to be controlled

and taught to behave as good citizens. Finally, we explore the ways in which northern

Sudanese administrators justified state violence and coercion in the languages of legalism and

developmentalism.

Colonial inheritances: legalism and developmentalism

The origin of authoritarian developmentalism and a legalistic approach to governance

in Sudan was rooted in a general ambition among government officials to render ‘legible’ the

societies they intended to dominate, by seeking to map, standardize and structure society so

that it could be easily measured, monitored and regulated for the purpose of control and

extraction of resources.8 Such efforts were not restricted to the late colonial period, but had

been integral to British imperialism since the late eighteenth century.9 In the interwar period,

the ideologies of indirect rule in Britain’s African colonies further encouraged the mapping

and ordering of colonial society according to tribes and chiefs, introducing uniform

hierarchies of chiefs’ courts with regularised powers and limitations.10

Law and legal

procedures were thus key tools in the quest for legibility. The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium

4

Government’s primary interwar development project, the Gezira cotton-growing scheme in

northern Sudan, also entailed control and ordering of its tenant farmer inhabitants. 11 Thus,

state visions of development both required and furthered knowledge and control of Sudanese

society.

By the 1940s, however, administrators’ amateur ethnographic reporting and the

conservative goals of the indirect rule era were being replaced by technocratic expertise,

centralised planning and increasingly ambitious development goals. The decades after the

Second World War were the heyday of government planning: belief in the transformatory

potential of technical and scientific knowledge, together with the growing international

pressure to confer the benefits of modernity upon the colonised, resulted in a model of

development in the colonies that was ‘profoundly state-centric’.12

Arguably, this ideology had

a particularly strong hold on the mind of government leaders and officials in Africa, both

before and after independence. Even in southern Sudan, where British administrative policy

remained largely conservative and cautious, the ambitions of late colonial development are

evident in the creation of the Zande cotton-growing Scheme. Like the Gezira Scheme, though

on a smaller scale, the Zande Scheme aimed at social engineering and resettlement as well as

economic development.13

The educated elite of northern Sudanese who inherited the government of the Anglo-

Egyptian Condominium shared the modernising zeal and developmentalist agenda of the

period. But this was combined with a distinctive sense of cultural superiority based on their

own identification with Arabness and Islam. Heather Sharkey’s study of the nationalist

movement among the Sudanese ‘modern’ elite of secondary school graduates demonstrates

how Arab nationalism and the British colonial mind-set converged within this social

segment.14

Education combined with Islam, Arabic language and lineage were seen as the

explanation for their ascension to power, but at the same time also as the basis for a uniform

national identity.

The Sudanese understanding of citizenship at this time was permeated by legal

language and a fetishisation of the law which resonates with a more general trend in colonial

Africa, where the language of the law was used to ‘authorize predation and criminalize

opposition’.15

This tendency was inherited by the postcolonial state, and the citizen was, as

Comaroff and Comaroff argue, primarily defined as ‘legal subject’.16

Scholars have argued

5

that the rhetoric of nation-building and development justified the continuation of

exclusionary and coercive government after the independence of African states.17

Citing

Mbembe, Young stresses that legalism was central to this programme:

With a disposition to violence and a propensity to arbitrary discipline of the subject

reminiscent of the indigénat, the state, committed to a vocation of ‘modernizing the

nation and civilizing the society’, inflated notions of subversion and ‘threats to state

security’ to facilitate punishment of the dissident ‘with the judicial formalism

characteristic of authoritarian regimes’.18

Legalism and developmentalism were intertwined in this authoritarian vision of

modernization. In the French colonial indigénat in West Africa, colonial governments had

long cited a lack of advancement among the populations they governed as justification for

colonial coercion and collective punishment.19

After decolonisation, postcolonial state

violence was ‘frequently (and paradoxically) designed to force participation in new political

communities dubbed republics, which were grounded at least rhetorically in emerging

principles of citizenship and equality’.20

Thus, developmentalism was used to justify

coercion: participation and compulsion were not antithetical in nationalist and government

discourse.

Starting ahead of the first wave of independence, the decolonisation process of the

Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government foreshadowed developments elsewhere in Africa.

Government officials in Sudan saw themselves as engaged in the education of southerners in

the meaning and duties of citizenship. For the early nationalists there was no conflict between

a modernising, civilising and nation-building effort in Sudan, and the desire to spread Islam

and the Arabic language; rather, these were seen as complementary and mutually reinforcing

goals. This should not however discount individual agency and idiosyncrasies. Like the

British administrators before them, there was a considerable variation in zeal and capacity

among the northern officials, and differences in their ability and interest in communicating

across the cultural chasm that separated them from the southerners. During this period we

also find some southerners in subordinate government positions at the district and province

level. Although most of these southerners increasingly favoured federalism or autonomy for

the south, in their daily execution of administrative responsibilities they adhered to the

northerners’ governance agenda and perceptions of southern Sudanese society.

6

Developing southern Sudan, 1954-55

The northern Sudanese who inherited the Sudanese government in the mid-1950s

regarded the mission to modernise and assimilate southern Sudan into the national polity as

imperative. The south was to the northern nationalists the prime example of colonial misrule

and divisive politics. They claimed they would reverse the marginalisation of the south

resulting from British administrative neglect, yet the new rulers adopted and perpetuated the

development agenda of their predecessors, alongside a strong belief in the power of modern

governance and its ultimate capacity to transform society. The official mind in the first year

of Sudanisation is revealed in a collection of annual reports from the districts of Equatoria

Province, mostly written in June 1955 – only weeks before the Torit Mutiny.21

The

developmentalist outlook is clearly visible in this report from Torit:

[N]o serious attempt was ever made to develop this District economically,

educationally, socially etc. ... In fact the forty years, which have now lapsed since the

Sudan Government took over this District, have not changed the plain Lotuho in the

least. They still lead the pastoral life [of] their forefathers and they are still undressed,

uneducated and as backward as they were found by the British [in] 1914. The British

hypothesis that these people are happy as they are is a fallacy which served as a ready

answer to any visitor who asked why these people were still in such a primitive

condition. It is high time for them to know or to be made to know that they, in their

present state, belong to a stage of civilization which disappeared hundreds of years

ago and that unless they adapt themselves to the prevailing stage the complexities of

the modern world will inevitably shatter their tribal life and destroy their obsolete

tradition against their will.22

Even before the violence of August 1955, then, Sudanese administrators asserted that

southerners must be ‘made to know’ that modernisation was inevitable. Such coercive

rhetoric and policy would become even stronger after 1955. The perceived reason for

southern Sudan’s lack of development was that the British had held the people back and

hindered northerners’ access to the area from 1924 to 1946.23

Nakedness and ‘indecency’

were seen to epitomise southern backwardness, to be stamped out for the ‘good prestige of

the Sudanese nation’.24

Yet despite their criticism of Condominium policies and practises, the new Sudanese

administrators retained many of the methods and ideas of their colonial predecessors. The

District Commissioner (DC) was still the man-on-the-spot who had full command of the

government’s meagre resources at the local level, and who was expected to get to know ‘his

7

people’ to overcome the illegibility of society. Above all, these administrators were to ensure

the preservation of law and order in their districts, as the Governor of Equatoria, Abdel Aziz

Omer el Amin, made clear to a meeting of the new northern DCs in Juba in February 1955:

As officials we are responsible to see that the constitution is observed and Law and

Order are maintained. In this connection all citizens must have equal rights and

obligations irrespective of their nationality, tribe, religion or any other differences. A

mixture of sympathy and firmness should be the basis of the Administration. The

Governor then made a special emphasis on as much trekking as possible and on

learning the local dialects as the best means for knowing the local people and gaining

their confidence.25

Noting the ‘delicate’ political atmosphere in Equatoria, the meeting further expressed concern

that northern Sudanese traders had not previously been subject to the jurisdiction of chiefs’

courts, and that some of them might have contributed to the ‘ill feeling’ in the province:

‘They have to be made to appreciate that all people are equal before the law and that they are

expected to set a good example and play their role in the betterment of the present

atmosphere’. The chiefs’ courts were to be further supported through a building programme:

‘For the prestige and respect of Native Courts, it is of great importance to build as decent

court houses as possible’.26

As this suggests, the new administrators were committed to the system of chiefs,

seeing them as the most reliable interlocutors between government and people. Like the

colonial government, the Sudanese officials depicted the ‘ordinary’ people as innocent in

their ignorance, needing protection from the corrupting influence of educated ‘detribalised’

politicians. At the end of 1955, the same Governor of Equatoria, El Amin, would reiterate the

innocence of the ‘Ordinary Citizen’:

By this is meant the man in the bush who has no special political ideas, and who is not

interested – or may not even know, what is going on. He must therefore be protected

well from any harmful influence. Every effort must be made to gain such man [sic].27

Reflecting the old contradictions of colonial policies, the new administration was thus both

determined to bring development and modernity to the southern provinces, and to protect and

conserve traditional authority and society: the DCs’ meeting in early 1955 vehemently

refuted a central government abolition of cattle fines on the grounds that it would ‘disrupt

8

their social fabric’, ‘break down the back bone of the customary law and consequently have a

very serious effect on the public security’.28

During these months before the Torit Mutiny, security problems were not perceived

as challenging the state’s authority, but rather were dismissed in a condescending and

paternalistic manner, harking back to the British days. The Torit annual report thus explains

the rise in crime within the district:

The newly enfranchised generation naturally wish [sic] to prove that they are equal to

the responsibility put over them and that they can do manly acts of homicide, arson

and grievous hurt. Hence the increase in major court cases.29

The new administrators were much less indulgent, however, when it came to attempts by

southern politicians and Egyptians to promote alternative political agendas for southern

Sudan. Southern political opposition was largely limited to the towns, especially Juba, which

was then the administrative headquarters of Equatoria. 30 A conference was held 18-21

October 1954 and southern parliamentarians organised a follow-up meeting 3-6 July 1955.31

A number of chiefs attended the 1954 conference, but it appears that they all abstained in

1955. In Equatoria, following a hint from a central government source, ‘politically minded’

administrators arranged for telegrams expressing support for Sudanese unity to be sent from

the chiefs of the different districts, the Zande case being particularly controversial and adding

to the general tension in the south in the months before the Mutiny.32

A similar incident took

place in the Eastern District:

In a big meeting held in June in the Toposa B/Court house at Kapoeta, attended by

chiefs, sub-chiefs, merchants and leading tribesmen of Topsa, Didinga and Boya, the

ideas of Unity with Egypt and separation of the South were unanimously rejected. All

those present made it quite clear to their members in the house of Representatives that

they will accept nothing short of a united fully independent Sudan.33

During the months of May-August, tension increased in southern Sudan. There was a

demonstration when the British Governor-General, Sir Knox-Helm, visited in May 1955:

‘various slogans which in essence, conveyed the creed of hostility to the northerners were

displayed in various ways. Legal proceedings had been taken against those who attempted to

create enmity between classes.’ 34 This recourse to legal instruments to control political

activity would be reinforced in the aftermath of the violence that erupted in August 1955.

9

The Torit Mutiny and the ‘outlaws’

The Torit Mutiny would have a deep and lasting impact on relations between the

southerners and their newly instated rulers. However, while these weeks of violence clearly

heightened security concerns, we argue that the Mutiny served only to accentuate the existing

discourse of legalism and the intertwining of development with security. For instance, reports

on Rumbek District described the effects of the 1955 Mutiny in terms of a spate of criminal

activity: ‘robberies and brigandage’.35

Vengeance against the mutineers was delivered

through the justice system, with trials quickly set up once the Mutiny was suppressed.36

There

were several reasons why the Sudan government attempted to restrain the use of extra-

judicial violence in their initial response to the Mutiny. Most important was the need to

demonstrate vis-à-vis Britain and Egypt that the government had the situation under control

and did not need any ‘assistance’ from co-domini forces.37

It is also conceivable that the

northern administration by using the courts to deal with the issue wished to demonstrate that

they were ‘civilised’ and modern and thus refrained from ‘barbaric’ retaliation. Most

importantly though, this resonates with the legalistic outlook of the new government where

superiority and development was displayed through the control and mastery of legal

instruments. This emphasis on legal codes when justifying emergency measures is also

evident in a later statement by the Governor of Equatoria from 1956, Ali Baldo, when he

wrote to DCs condemning the ill-treatment of prisoners and warning of the danger of

alienating people and undermining confidence in government and justice. 38 Moreover, to

combat rumours of abuses of southern prisoners in the north, the Province Council was

informed that the prisoners were well taken care of and treated fairly.39

Some of the mutineers escaped capture and remained ‘in the bush’, but by late 1956

the security challenge posed by the mutineers in Equatoria was in reality minimal.40

One

group in Eastern District was supposed to consist of only three mutineers operating in concert

with Toposa ‘tribesmen’. Another group led by Lomiluk Lohide and Latada Hillir was a

threat to government control in the area east of Torit. These two groups carried out a few

ambushes. In one instance a group of cars carrying the DC and high ranking chiefs of the

District were attacked on their way back from a meeting in Uganda. These attacks led to

military operations where villages and crops were burned and cattle confiscated, but which

10

failed to effectuate the capture of the ‘outlaws’. During 1956 and 1957 other ‘outlaws’ were

pursued in Eastern District and also in one case further north in the Pibor/Boma area; severe

penalties were meted out to those that were found to assist them in any capacity. Although

the impact of their operations were negligible, these groups were considered a challenge to

the government’s control and prestige in southern Sudan; it was feared that if they were not

dealt with swiftly and thoroughly they would be followed by others and the government

control would crumble. In consequence, the ‘outlaws’ exercised a disproportionate influence

on the official imagination in the years after the Mutiny, contributing to a preoccupation with

security, law and order and loyalty to the state.

The use of coercive force to control political demonstrations was deemed necessary to

prevent ‘innocent’ citizens getting dragged into criminal activity.41 The above-mentioned acts

of brutality perpetrated by southerners during the Torit Mutiny compelled administrators to

believe that the southerners were potentially dangerous and it appears that northerners in

southern Sudan felt more insecure subsequently, especially in Equatoria. In Torit the situation

was normalising at a slow rate; as late as November 1956, Governor Ali Baldo reported that:

The District Commissioner Torit has now moved from the house he used to occupy in

the army cantonment to his proper house in the Town and so did his assistant. This

has re-assured the local people and gave them confidence that the situation has

returned to normal. On the other hand it has had its effect in raising the morale of the

terror striken [sic] northern merchants in Torit.42

Civil administrators in the district lived in the barracks more than a year after the

Mutiny, indicating the high level of perceived insecurity. Arrests and prosecutions were

widespread even in the Bahr el-Ghazal province, which had seen little violence during the

Mutiny.43 Violence had escalated quickly during the first days of the Mutiny and to avoid this

in the future it was assumed that swift and strict measures were necessary when new

incidents occurred. The prioritisation of security lead to the creation and extension of an

intelligence apparatus in the south: a meeting of provincial governors in 1956 ‘resolved that

the District Commissioner should have a personal responsibility in operating and checking

the Intelligence system in his district’.44

The northern officials argued – much like their colonial predecessors – that only a

firm display of justice and law enforcement would ensure that government authority was

11

upheld. Even in 1957, an intelligence report from Eastern District warned of the continuing

dangers of not having caught and convicted the ‘outlaws’ from the mutiny:

As a result of several raids that took place in the Eastern District between Toposa-

Boya in which some mutineers took part and which involved deaths on both parts and

maiming and looting of cattle rumours started to spread amongst the simple tribesmen

of failure of Government to trace and punish the offenders. This has been interpreted

by the populace of the area as weakness on the part of the Government. Further

rumours went as far as accusing the Government of releasing murderers at Juba and

though they see the Government arrest murderers and try them yet they have not

heard of any murderer being hanged and therefore they believe that such murderers

who, after trial sent to Juba, are subsequently released.45

Whether these ‘rumours’ had any root in actual sentiments among people in Eastern District

is unclear, but officials were evidently convinced of the need to demonstrate ‘strong’

government through arrests and punishments. In November 1957, the same official reported

on some successes:

A fairly good deal of improvement in public security in Eastern District had prevailed

after the recent mass arrests of outlaws and murderers and their deterrent punishments

by state of Chiefs Special Courts. The wild and savage Toposa of Riwato, and Nikor

and the notorious Boya of Thugurn and Longarim Hills have come to realize that

there is a strong Government that came to stay and rule and keep peace order and give

justice.46

This assumed change of heart was wishful thinking, but the quote is evidence of the

prevailing government view on peoples in the rural peripheries. The central role of chiefs in

policing and security helped to maintain the government focus on justice – but equally

fundamental was the belief that the demonstration of effective justice was vital to building

confidence in government.

Security became an explicit signifier of a state-society contract and the duties of

citizenship: it was the duty of the state to protect its citizens, ‘and if mutineers are left at large

they constitute a danger to citizens’; conversely it was also the duty of the citizens to

contribute to security: ‘we need cooperation of the whole citizens for their own safety and

security’.47 This contract had a long history: from the earliest days of colonial rule, British

officers had promised state protection in return for loyalty and cooperation.48

Chiefs had been

and remained central to the contract:

12

Good and loyal chiefs will be always rewarded while slack and bad ones will be

severely punished... [S]ecurity ranks first and... chiefs are responsible to clear their

areas from mutineers and their firearms so that government officials give them the

best of their generosity and services.49

These northern Sudanese officers were not simply asserting the coercive force of the state –

though they did not veil this threat in addressing the chiefs – but were also emphasising quite

explicitly the dependence of the state on its citizens for security, and vice versa.

Despite the modernising rhetoric of Sudan’s administrators, the threat of violence

made them even more committed to the system of Native Administration than their colonial

predecessors had been.50

In the immediate aftermath of the Torit Mutiny, Equatoria Governor

El Amin urged the need to win over the ‘ordinary citizens’ in the south and to establish

‘friendly relations’:

The best suggested means being personal contact and application of justice. Of course

he needs to be convinced that his District Commissioner is here to serve him and

NOT to rule him. All this must be done without belittling the Chief who has specific

importance... Social contacts must be encouraged to bridge the gab [sic] between

Northerners and Southerners...

[Southern] Members of Parliament... have to observe the law and must in NO case be

allowed to interfere with the administration.51

One of the first acts of the government after the 1955 mutiny was to raise the pay of chiefs.

Local Government Councils were at the same time pilloried for weakening ‘Chiefs in

particular and administration in general’.52 Chiefly members of the province council who had

fled to Uganda and Congo were replaced with ‘loyalists’. These chiefs were told that they

were the ‘eye, ear and hand of government’.53 In 1957, the Sudan Government’s ministerial

committee for the affairs of the south recommended the ‘warranting of wider administrative

and legal powers’ to improve the status of chiefs and ‘to add to their prestige and influence’.54

The judicial role of chiefs was stressed, and DCs were issuing orders about the proper

recording of court cases by chiefs and other matters of procedure. The Chief Justice asked the

Governors of the Southern Provinces to report on whether there was indeed a need to increase

the ‘legal powers’ of chiefs, cautioning that this should only be done if it was ‘absolutely

necessary for maintenance of public peace and order’, but agreeing that it was ‘a sound policy

to increase the prestige of those Chiefs who administer local justice in their areas’. 55

Moreover, in the name of security, state violence was outsourced to chiefs and their retainers:

13

It is evident... that there are still many mutineers on both sides of the river [Nile] and

that their activity is on the increase every day. It is evident also that these mutineers

are finding sympathy, help and shelter from the local people. Chiefs have failed to

arrest them and we should not expect them to do so without arming their retainers as

recommended in my Security Council Meeting in May.56

But effective law enforcement and intelligence gathering was seen to depend upon ‘friendly

relations’ with the population as well as on the loyalty of chiefs. Law and justice were thus

both the means of winning over citizens and of protecting them from the dangerous influence

of politicians.

Forging the Sudanese nation: law and citizenship

The government discourse of law and order was linked to the definition of citizenship

and nationalism in southern Sudan. Seen from the Sudanese nationalist perspective, a citizen

must accept the sovereignty of the new rulers: adherence to the project of creating a united

Sudan was required. There was no sympathy for alternative agendas – in particular attempts

to gain federal status for southern Sudan. Southern politicians were viewed as destabilising

elements in the newly independent Sudan, assumed to be under the influence of Christian

missionaries. Nationalist and even international dimensions of the Torit Mutiny were

engendered by the assumed involvement of foreign missionaries and that fact that the

mutineers who escaped to the Uganda Protectorate were given sanctuary and Ugandan

colonial authorities refused to repatriate them to the Sudan – Sudan government reports even

alleged that some of the mutineers were hired by the Ugandan government.57 This fuelled

suspicions of British intentions towards the Sudan, and southern Sudan in particular.

Eventually relations with Britain improved: by early 1957 the colonial government of Uganda

was cooperating militarily with the Sudan in the search for mutineers in the border areas.58

But suspicion continued to hang over the missionaries. The Sudan government

decision to nationalise mission-run schools in southern Sudan in 1957 has been interpreted as

proof of its religious intolerance and desire to Arabise and Islamise the southerners by force.

However, it was nationalist and legalistic arguments – not religious – that were used to take

over the mission schools and get rid of the missionaries: they were portrayed as foreign

agents undermining the government and instigating rebellion and disunity in the south. 59

Regardless of the quality and cost-effectiveness of the missionary-based education system its

14

very existence was an affront to the whole idea of an independent nation. Nonetheless

politicians and government officials in Khartoum and in southern Sudan wanted to appear

tolerant and responsible. It is testimony to the Sudan government’s desire for foreign

recognition and approval – and its belief in the superiority of legal instruments – that it used

the formal government apparatus to marginalise and finally to evict the missionaries. Indeed,

some evidence indicates an element of reluctance among some Northern administrators in the

south towards implementing the central policy against the missionaries and it appears that

most decisions regarding the missionaries were deferred to the central government.60

The independent government’s education strategy towards the South was focused on

teaching Islam and Arabic: this was not only a vehicle for spreading a religion and a

language, but also intended to promote cultural homogeneity and national unity. In 1960,

Equatoria Governor Ali Baldo issued a lengthy statement on the imposition of Friday as the

rest day which he ordered DCs to translate and disseminate as widely as possible so that ‘all

people in the south particularly southerners should know the bare facts’. The statement was

clearly intended as a public assertion of state sovereignty, couching the issue in terms not of

religion but of allegiance to the state:

[T]he decision has the legal as well as the moral force of the State. To put it in plain

and simple language, opposition to the Government decision would mean an

opposition to the State itself. To this extent this Republic is simply more than

competent to enforce its will and to see that it is to be obeyed and respected...

The authors and instigators of the so-called ‘Sunday Protest’ should be reminded that

even Christ himself orders obedience to the State: Render to God what are God’s and

to Caeser what are Caeser’s [sic].61

Government officials saw themselves as engaged in educating the southerners in

citizenship, in how to become a legal subject. It was the duty of the government – ‘to protect

the interests of the citizens’, to build up the ‘moral force’ of the state, and to prepare the way

for both development and political participation.62 As elsewhere, such ‘participation’ might

be compelled or coerced, as part of the education of citizens in their own duties and rights. It

was not only northern Sudanese administrators who professed to such discourse: the few

southern administrators participated in it too, such as William Deng Nhial, writing in 1956:

‘It takes time for a Country like the Sudan to make the Local people understand the

machinery of Local Government and make them active participants in its economic, social

and democratic developments’ [emphasis added].63

In 1960, he wrote again to Governor Ali

15

Baldo, supporting the unity of the Sudan and asserting that ‘we still have a long way to go in

educating our people in citizenship’.64 Other southern politicians and administrators similarly

promoted modernisation and development, and urged the people to be ‘good citizens’.65

Governor Ali Baldo occupied a dominant position in Equatoria and in southern Sudan

more widely in these years, and has often been vilified in the southern Sudanese scholarship

as emblematic of northern tyranny.66

But government documents reveal the extent to which

he sought to express, explain and justify the authoritarianism of government to other

administrators, and his concern to assert government legitimacy and prestige to both southern

and international audiences. He thus epitomises the legalistic and developmentalist discourse,

as well as the authoritarianism of government in this period. For example following the

discovery in early 1958 of a possible ‘vicious conspiracy which aims at realizing the Federal

Status through the incitement of the public and the use of violence’, he lectured his DCs on

the notion of the citizen as legal subject:

It is our duty Northerners and Southerners to preserve peace and order and to apply

the law of the State with precision and accuracy and we have to be prepared for every

eventuality and make sacrifice in the realization of this object. We should therefore

take all legal precautions to prevent a breach of the peace... but in the same time this

should not divert us from pursuing our friendly relations with the people to gain their

full confidence and to serve them and do for their good. ... We will continue to respect

and serve the people so long as they behave themselves and obey law and order but as

soon as they try to go out of that orbit by adopting another course we shall have

nothing but to take the most drastic measures against them.

Ali Baldo’s governorship of Equatoria bridged the period before and after the elections and

military coup of 1958. The military government of General Abboud is generally seen to have

accelerated harsh repression and policies of Islamisation in the southern provinces, but some

scholars have also noted a more gradual hardening of government policies and method across

the period between 1956 and the early 1960s.67

The correspondence and reports by Baldo and

other administrators reflect this overall continuity of discourse to justify increasingly

repressive measures.

Ali Baldo is also significant for his explicit engagement with the wider statism and

governmentality of the period. In 1960, he sent the DCs an extract from a speech on Congo

by the UN Secretary General, which declared that

16

to lead and govern is not a privilege to be sought but a burden of responsibility to be

assumed... We have had to act as responsible human brings facing a desperate

emergency. You try to save a drowning man without prior authorization and even if

he resists you; you do not let him go even when he tries to strangle you.

He clearly found this metaphor particularly apposite:

[T]his extract had struck me as a genuine and true representation of the new

conception of the art of Governing which each of us should bear in mind if we are to

succeed in serving our Country well. Our particular role here in the South demands

from us a more strict adherence to such theories which we should not only conceive

but must make the people feel that we are being guided by them.68

Again the continuities from the British colonial rhetoric of duty and responsibility are very

much evident even in this endorsement of a ‘new conception of the art of governing’,

together with the sense that wider theories and ideologies could add legitimacy to the

Sudanese administrators’ efforts to save the southerners from drowning in their colonially-

entrenched backwardness. Although seldom as lofty as Ali Baldo, this mentality is reflected

in much of the contemporary official correspondence of both northern and southern officials.

Linking development with law, order and the goal of national unity

The Torit Mutiny and its aftermath contributed to linking notions of development and

modernisation with security and law in southern Sudan. The lack of development was

presented as the explanation for violence: security broke down because ‘the people are poor

and ignorant and can be mislead [sic] by anybody’.69 In 1956, at the first meeting of the

Equatoria Province Council after the August 1955 violence, Ali Baldo stressed the

interdependence of security and development, and the continuing need to increase

productivity, move people into villages and register land:

We are all convinced that this backward part of the country requires much effort for

its progress and development, but there could be no development without law, order,

confidence and time under the guidance of skilled personnel. The urgent necessity for

the creation of local capital by local effort must be the prime duty of everyone of us

[original emphasis]. This is the only way or means for expansion within the economic

frame work or advance in any social legislation. We must produce more than we

consume. ... The success and failure of such schemes depends on the full cooperation

and confidence between the administration and the producers.70

17

In the same meeting, the commander of the army in the south, Miralai Ahmed Bey Abu Bakr,

reinforced the message:

The country’s development schemes, whether Educational, Agricultural, Industrial or

Commercial, depend entirely upon public security. It would be beyond impossible for

any individual or community to carry out their duties satisfactorily if the security is

endangered.

When one of the chiefs who made up the council emphasised that development and increased

productivity depended on access to capital, he was again reminded by the Governor that

‘Capital whether local or foreign needs security first’.71

Development and modernisation was firmly predicated on notions of security and law

and order. ‘Backwardness’ also served as a justification for coercive policing and state

violence. The British and Condominium policies were blamed for the southerners’ lack of

development, yet the independent government’s use of coercion and collective punishment

were rooted in colonial practises and ideology, much as in other parts of Africa.72

Moreover,

as seen above, the Sudanese administration relied on the chiefs and structures of the colonial

‘Native Administration’ as the primary means of obtaining intelligence and enforcing law and

order. Paradoxically then, development and modernisation – and the reversal of colonial

neglect – were to be achieved by colonial governance ideology and by bolstering the

authority of the agents of colonial rule to maintain security. The independent government’s

investments and initiatives in sectors related to social and economic development were

believed to also contribute towards a national developmentalist and cultural integration

agenda. Economic development in southern Sudan was almost exclusively promoted through

the development of plantations and cash-crop cultivation, with initiatives including an

agricultural research station in Yambio, forestry and saw mills in Torit, a rice scheme in

Aweil and the growing of tobacco in Maridi.73

Extension of the rail network to Aweil and

Wau was first and foremost a measure to increase government control, but was also intended

to have development impact.

Prison labour was presented as a vehicle for generation of government revenue and

development of the economy. Extensive use of prison labour, as a part of a more general

system of forced labour, was a colonial legacy. The Condominium had used prison labour as

well as forced seasonal labour organised through the chiefs to maintain roads and other

18

government infrastructure projects. The independent government similarly demanded labour

but paid the labourer at a (low) fixed rate. It also relied on prison labour. In 1958, Ali Baldo

urged DCs to double the areas under cultivation in their districts and the prison authorities

were seen as an element in this strategy. In the meeting, the Senior Controller of Prisons

made a full account of what the Prison Camps are doing mentioning some of the their

achievements, the most important of which is the Lafon Scheme, which will be started

this year by an area of 500 feddans to be put under Dura cultivation. He said at the

moment he has 100 prisoners working in this plantation and will as a matter of fact

need 150 more to be supplied from Districts to cope with this seasons until the

Scheme is mechanised next year.74

Moreover, prison labour was an opportunity to shape southerners into producers of cash

crops. This was perceived as a way to expand the monetary economy, but also as a remedy

against the perceived ‘laziness’ and ‘idleness’ of southerners.75

This report from Bahr el-

Ghazal illustrates this policy and perception of southerners:

It is worth mentioning here that among the many schemes of the prison department in

this province, durra [sorghum] is given top attention, not only because it increases

prison revenue, but that its cultivation acquaints the prisoners with the job, which

most of them might have not been able to do, during their free life or, which they

regarded as tiresome and non productive [sic], Durra Plantations are also set up in

villages to enable the natives of those villages to see their relative prisoners do the

work, with the simple tools which they are unable to work with and to witness the

prison products of the soil, which many of them regard, as being unsuitable for

cultivation. It is hoped that with the prison example, people will increase their efforts

to produce enough for their consumption and their needs.76

The penal system was thus tied not only to the establishment of the security that was seen to

be so necessary for development, but also to the demonstration of what state-coerced

development could achieve.

Conclusion

In southern Sudan, the Torit Mutiny and its aftermath contributed to an intensification

of state authoritarianism, with Sudanese administrators prepared to use coercion to engender

‘participation’ and development. Such governance discourses and their accompanying

ideologies mediate between structures and agency in the sense that they delimitated the

boundaries of the possible and channelled the attention and initiative of the government

officials. But, even more importantly, these discourses were deeply embedded in the

19

institutions of government and transcended not only the individual administrator, but also

changes of regime. Thus, it is possible to see long-term continuities in these authoritarian

visions of development, modernity and citizenship among later southern administrators as

well as their northern Sudanese and British predecessors: this was epitomised in the 1970s by

the President of the High Executive Council of Southern Sudan, Abel Alier’s much-quoted

declaration ‘If we have to drive our people to paradise with sticks we will do so for their own

good’.77

But in the political context of the late 1950s, these agendas among the Sudanese

state elite were interpreted by many southerners as a project to exclude or repress rather than

to include and improve.

By using the language of the law and the coercive apparatus of state law enforcement

(including the Native Administration structures) to delineate citizenship and to promote

development, the Sudanese administrators only made starker the exclusionary and repressive

aspects of their statism and nationalism. The government discourses analysed in this article

were thus significant not merely as self-justificatory rhetoric or self-motivating ideology, but

for their role in setting the terms of political debate. As southern resistance intensified during

the 1960s, opposition groups appropriated government representatives’ own legalistic

discourse to criticise the latter’s ‘suppression’ ‘forced assimilation’ and ‘domination’.78

And

as such resistance was criminalised by government, those who found themselves outside the

law – and hence denied rights of citizenship – were forced into political exile or armed

rebellion.79

The justification of state violence fed the rhetoric of violent opposition that would

ultimately escalate into civil war from 1963.

20

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Endnotes

1 Rolandsen, “False start”; Government of Sudan, Report Commission of Enquiry.

2 Collins, History of Modern Sudan, 67; see also Poggo, First Sudanese Civil War, 47.

3 Beshir, Southern Sudan; Abd al-Rahim, Imperialism and Nationalism; Wai, “Pax

Brittanica”; Poggo, First Sudanese Civil War. 4 Rolandsen, “False Start.”

5 Holt and Daly, History of the Sudan, 121–2; Collins, History of Modern Sudan, 65, 77–9;

Johnson, Root Causes, 29–32. 6 Holt and Daly, History of the Sudan, 115.

7 This article is largely based on evidence from the South Sudan National Archive (SSNA) in

Juba, with supplementary documentation from the National Records Office (NRO) in

Khartoum. 8 Scott, Seeing Like a State.

9 Cohn, Colonialism; Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”; Basset, “Cartography and

Empire Building”; Edney, Mapping an Empire. 10

E.g. Berry, No Condition Is Permanent. 11

Bernal, “Colonial Moral Economy,” 447–479; Barnett, Gezira Scheme.

22

12

Lewis, Empire State-Building, 19; Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats.” 13

Reining, The Zande Scheme. 14

Sharkey, Living with Colonialism. 15

Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 11. 16

Ibid., 18. 17

Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. 18

Young, African Colonial State, 287. 19

Mann, “What Was the Indigénat?,” 340–43. 20

Ibid., 352. 21

SSNA, EP 57/E/3.1, “District Annual Reports Equatoria Province 1954/55.” 22

Ibid., 2-3. 23

Government of Sudan, Report Commission of Enquiry, 16–17, 81. 24

SSNA MD 1/B/1, El Tijani Saad, Acting Governor Bahr el Ghazal, to DCs, Wau, 12

January 1955; Burton and Jennings, “Introduction.” 25

SSNA MD 32/A/1, A. O. El Amin, “District Commissioners’ Meeting Juba 1-5 February

1955,” 14 February 1955. 26

Ibid. 27

SSNA MD 32/A/1, “Minutes of the District Commissioner’s [sic] Meeting, Juba, on 6-9

December 1955”; Rolandsen, “False Start,” 117. 28

SSNA MD 32/A/1, A. O. El Amin, “District Commissioners’ Meeting, Juba, 1-5 February

1955”, 14 February 1955. 29

SSNA, EP 57/E/3.1, “Torit District,” in “District Annual Reports Equatoria Province

1954/55”, 18. 30

Howell, “Political leadership”; Passmore Sanderson and Sanderson, Education, Religion

and Politics. 31

Government of Sudan, Report Commission of Enquiry, 14, 21, 86; Johnson, Root Causes,

27. 32

Government of Sudan, Report Commission of Enquiry, 87–91. Cf. SSNA ZD/57.B.1,

“Zande District Monthly Report” June 1955; Wawa, Southern Sudanese Pursuits of Self-

Determination, 80–141; Johnson, British Documents on the End of Empire: Sudan. 33

SSNA EP 57/E/3.1, “Eastern District” in “District Annual Reports Equatoria Province

1954/55,” 15. See also, idem., “Torit District,” 16. 34

SSNA EP 57/E/3.1, “Juba District” in “District Annual Reports Equatoria Province

1954/55,” 5. 35

SSNA UNP BD 57/B/2, “Lakes District Monthly Diary” September 1955. 36

SSNA MD 39/A/1, Osman el Tayeb, Province Judge, Southern Provinces Juba, “Directive

under the Criminal Courts Emergency Procedure (Standard) Regulations 1955,” 15

September 1955. 37

Rolandsen, “False start,” 110–11. 38

SSNA MD 39/A/1, Ali Baldo, Governor Equatoria and Acting Province Judge, to all DCs,

28 November 1956. 39

SSNA EP 1/C/1.3, “Minutes of the 8th

Meeting of the Equatoria Province Council Held at

Juba Town Council Chamber on 21st and 22

nd July 1956.”

40 Rolandsen, “False Start,” 111–16.

41 SSNA MD 36/B/1, “Minutes of security meeting, Governor’s house, 2 June1958 at 6pm.”

42 NRO UNP 1/20/168, “Equatoria Province Monthly Intelligence Report [EPMIR],”

November 1956. 43

NRO, UNP 1/20/168, I El Tahir for Governor, “Bahr el-Ghazal Province Intelligence

Report,” 1 Sep. 1955 – 30 Nov. 1955.

23

44

SSNA MD 32/A/1 “Minutes of the Southern Provinces Governor’s [sic] meeting, Juba, 28

October 1956.” See also Rolandsen, “False start,” 117. 45

NRO UNP 1/20/168, Ahmed for A/Governor, “EPMIR,” 1-31 July 1957. 46

NRO UNP 1/20/168, SKM Ahmed, “Equatoria Province Half Monthly Intelligence Report

[EPHMIR],” 16-30 Nov 1957. 47

SSNA EP 1/C/1.3, “Minutes of the 8th

Meeting of the Equatoria Province Council held at

Juba Town Council Chamber on 21st and 22

nd July 1956.”

48 Leonardi, Dealing with Government.

49 SSNA EP 1/C/1.3, “Minutes of the 8

th Meeting of the Equatoria Province Council held at

Juba Town Council Chamber on 21st and 22

nd July 1956.”

50 Leonardi, Dealing with Government, 138–42.

51 SSNA MD 32/A/1, “Minutes of the District Commissioner’s [sic] Meeting held in Juba, 6-

9 December 1955”. 52

SSNA MD 32/A/1, “Minutes DC Meeting 6-9 December 1955”; idem., “Minutes DC

Meeting 28 October 1956”. 53

SSNA EP 1/C/1.3, “Minutes of the 8th

Meeting of the Equatoria Province Council Held at

Juba Town Council Chamber on 21st and 22

nd July 1956”.

54 SSNA MD 1/B/1, M. A. Abu Rannat, Chief Justice, to Governors of Southern Provinces,

18 March 1957. 55

Ibid. 56

NRO UNP 1/20/168, A. R. Saied, A/Governor, “Equatoria Province Intelligence Report

[EPIR],” July/August 1956. 57

E.g. NRO UNP 1/20/168, A. R. Saied, A/Governor, “ EPIR,” April/May 1956, June/July

1956 and July/August 1956. 58

NRO UNP 1/20/168, Gurein, “EPHMIR,” 2nd

half April 1957. 59

Rolandsen, “False Start,” 119–21. 60

[Verona Fathers’ Mission], Sudan Government Secret Plans. 61

SSNA MD 1/B/1, Ali Baldo, Governor of Equatoria, to all DCs, “Facts from Equatoria

Province”, 13 March 1960. 62

Ibid. 63

SSNA EP 100/B/3.3, W. D. Nhial, A/Executive Officer, Yei Rural Council, “Yei Rural

Council Annual Report for 1955/1956”, 28 July 1956. 64

SSNA MD 1/B/1, William Deng Nhial, Mamur of Tembura sub-district, to Governor

Equatoria, 25 January 1960. 65

Eg Benjamin Lwoki in Rumbek, 1956, SSNA UNP BD 57/B/2, “Lakes District Monthly

Diary,” November 1956. 66

Even the northern Sudanese scholar Mohamed Omer Beshir cites Ali Baldo as an example

of advocates of the forcible integration of southerners into the Sudanese nation: Southern

Sudan, 80–81. 67

Passmore Sanderson and Sanderson, Education, Religion and Politics, 356. 68

SSNA MD 1/B/1, Ali Baldo, Governor Equatoria, to all DCs, 30 October 1960. 69

SSNA MD 36/B/1, “Record of Meeting, Governor’s house, 31 March 1957 at 6.30pm”. 70

SSNA EP 1/C/1.3, “Minutes of the 8th

Meeting of the Equatoria Province Council Held at

Juba Town Council Chamber on 21st and 22

nd July 1956”.

71 Ibid.

72 Mann, “What Was the Indigénat?”, 340–43.

73 SSNA EP 1/A/14, “Southern Development”, passim.

74 SSNA MD 32/A/1, “Minutes of District Commissioners’ Meeting Held on 29

th March

1958 at 10.30 a.m. at Governor’s Residence”, 5.

24

75

E.g.: ‘Local people were given priority for engagement on construction works in order to

combat idleness’, SSNA EP 1/A/14, DC Office Maridi to Governor Equatoria, “Issue of

Future Magazine”, 9 May 1959. 76

Bulletin no. 141, Bahr El Ghazal Daily, published by the Ministry of Information Office

Wau, 11 June 1959. 77

Willis, “Ambitions of the State”, 117. 78

Voice of Southern Sudan 1, i (1963); “Statement by Mr. Joseph Oduho President Sudan

African Closed Districts National Union, London,” 17 December 1962, Sudan Open Archive

(Accessed 24 March 2014). 79

Rolandsen, “Anya-Nya insurgency.”